On the Road: The colours of small fall

When I'm taking pictures in the rain, anyway. That's because I like driving slowly along with the window rolled down, looking and listening and smelling the countryside as I idle by. And on Monday, it was a great day to get my arm wet.

I know I've mentioned this before but the light, scant as it is under all those clouds, has a quality that you just don't get under any other conditions. It's soft, shadowless and just seems to wrap around everything. And combined with the wetness that rainy days bring, it makes every bit of colour just scream.

I like to call this time of year small fall. It's that transitional time between the last days of summer and the first days of autumn when the temperatures are still warm, sometimes even hot, during the day but cool off more at night. Daylight hours are getting fewer, mornings arrive later and night seems to fall with a kind of suddenness that wasn't there just a few weeks before.

And along with those changes we notice come changes in the things we might not necessarily notice, too. Like the colours of the natural world.

Out in the foothills the changes are a bit tough to spot. The more subtle ones are things like the colour of grass or the condition of the leaves. The grass is more yellow and pastures are shades of brown now that summer growth is over and seed is set. Like their relatives out in the farmlands — wheat, barley and such — their season is finished and they've done their reproductive duty. Unlike those farm crops, though, they'll still be around to do it again next year without any prompting from us.

Leaves are kind of like that, too. Their job is over for the year and now they are beginning to fade from green to whatever colours underlie the chlorophyll that has worked so hard for the last several months. Their colour is mostly subtle at the moment but give them another few weeks…

What I was looking for, though, was the less subtle colour, the kind of colour that a drab, rainy day really brings to life.

My first stop was at the beaver ponds on Pine Creek, just a bit southwest of the city. No matter what time of year, there's always something to see here and today was no exception. But it wasn't quite what I was looking for.

The colour was there and it shone in the rain. It brightened the colours of a mat of cattails that a pair of coots were relaxing on and helped differentiate the blue colours of a kingfisher from the background. The yellow hawkweed really glowed and the pinks of the thistle blossoms, though beginning to fade, stood out against the warm yellows and greens behind them.

But the best example of how the colours are enhanced by the rain and soft light was a little further down the road.

I pass things like this all the time. I always notice them but I rarely stop to take any pictures. Today, though, it was different.

I'm talking about the bark on dead or dying trees. It's a subtle thing you might not notice, but the eroding bark is often a palette of greys and blacks and creams and oranges studded by bright patches of lichens. It doesn't look like much, though, until it gets wet.

Then the colours jump out, especially the oranges and yellows of the intact bark and the nearly fluorescent greens and lemons of the lichens. Beauty and the eye of the beholder, I know. Today, I saw beauty.

It didn't take long for my jacket sleeve and shirt to soak through, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't as wet as the whitetail doe I found just past the old tree. She was standing there with the misty rain sifting down onto her, belly-deep in tall grass and shrubs, tiny droplets on the tips of her fur and a single bit of green leaf on her nose.

She didn't look cold, though. Nature provides her folks with a lot of good insulation.

Me, I was getting a bit chilly so I rolled up the window and headed on to look for colour that was a little bit more bright.

I'm usually pretty good at identifying plants. Not all of them, of course, but at least the more common ones. But this one threw me.

Mostly because of the colour. The leaves were the most aggressive red I think I have ever seen in the foothills. In that soft, drizzly light they were almost an assault on the eyes and made the greens around them look nearly grey in comparison.

There was only that one shrub, a scream of scarlet among the soft yellows and greens. Was it a native plant? Could be, I guess, but I would have thought, given the frequency that I drive this road, that I would have noticed before. I think it was likely something that had taken root here, maybe from seeds dropped by a passing bird, and gone feral.

But I was looking for bright colour and, man, I found it.

And plenty of more subtle colour, too.

Currant leaves were turning orange and red and hawthorn berries — part of the rose family — were getting bright, too. Not many of them around here. Greens on some of the low plants were fading to lime and lemon. A few fireweed still had their blossoms but the leaves on most were turning flamelike.

Cattails were turning, too. Their tops were ragged from being wind-tossed while the bottoms of their long, flat leaves were shades from rust to variations of green. Their brown, sausage-like seed heads were showing signs of releasing their tucked-in parachutes, counting on the autumn winds to carry them off to new homes.

Rain was alternating between downpours and mist, leaving the meadows shining and the leaves dripping. Down low among the grass and sedges, fuzzy-leaved plants caught the drops in silver beads while rivulets ran down the trunks of the aspens and poplars.

Rose hips hadn't quite reached their brightest colour yet but things like the berries on false Solomon's seal — what an awkward name — were nearly as bright as those leaves I'd seen earlier. I found a couple of plants I couldn't identify that had unusual, leathery chocolate-coloured leaves. Dark as they were, they really sucked up the dim light but the colour was still intense.

I kept rolling on for a bit, finally cranking up the window to give my soaked arm a break. In the ditches and foothills forest around me, splashes of small fall colour kept catching my eye, like the red leaves and cream-coloured berries of osier dogwood and the soon-to-be cold heat of the fireweed leaves.

Above me and around me, though, all was still green. It framed a trio of whitetail bucks that had bounced across the road and filled the sky above. But it won't be long before that changes. Two weeks, maybe three, and fall colours will start to bloom.

For now, though, we have small fall.